It Gets Worse for the GOP

How the excesses of the Bush administration led to the Tea Party and a different kind of Republican imprudence.

Initially, the American people’s verdict on the government shutdown appeared to be “a pox on both their houses.” Republicans received plurality blame, but Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and both major parties took something of a hit in the early polls.

But as the shutdown has continued, public opinion is beginning to look as one-sided as it did in 1995-96, if it isn’t worse. The Republican Party’s favorability rating is at a record low, falling 10 points since September to just 28 percent. That’s the lowest for either major party since Gallup started asking the question in 1992.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found even worse results for the GOP. Most telling, approval of Obamacare—though still low—has risen since October 1 despite a rocky roll-out. This does not bode well for efforts to use the shutdown as leverage to defund Obamacare.

Polling is ephemeral and the 2014 elections are the political equivalent of a lifetime away. But none of the falsifiable predictions made by the proponents of this tactic have come true. They said that the Democrats would make major concessions to avoid a shutdown. But the Obama administration is trying to implement the Obamacare exchanges and the government is still shut down.

It was argued that the country would rise up and demand the defunding of Obamacare in response to this confrontation. There is no evidence of such a popular revolt, and some reason to think the shutdown is actually hurting opposition to Obamacare. It was said that President Obama and the Democrats would take the blame for shutting down the government over an unpopular law. Nearly every major poll shows the blame running in the other direction.

The problem the defunders were always going to run into was this: Obama himself would have to agree to defund Obamacare. Failing that, the defunders would need to win over enough other Democrats to form veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress.

Needless to say, neither outcome was ever very likely. What’s more, the end game depended on producing an impasse so protracted and painful that the Democrats would be forced to reconsider. But that would require creating conditions just as likely to turn public opinion against Republicans.

Yet the leading proponents of the government shutdown are more popular with key portions of the conservative activist base than Republicans who are skeptical of this approach. These conservatives don’t care what the polls say, and even after the 2012 election, aren’t sure that the numbers haven’t been skewed by the liberal media.

What these conservatives want is to see their elected officials fight. They are tired of hearing Republicans make excuses as to why government spending cannot be cut. They don’t believe Republicans who say they will work to undercut or fix Obamacare later any more than they believe the Democrats will secure the border after passing an immigration amnesty.

In a very real sense, the Texas Republican who is most responsible for the current stalemate may not be Ted Cruz, but George W. Bush. In 2005, Republicans held the White House. They held both houses of Congress. Republican appointees entered the Supreme Court. The GOP enjoyed a 55-45 Senate majority.

Aside from the confirmation of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, conservatives have very little to show for this period of unified Republican control of the federal government. And after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare with Roberts’s vote, that confirmation has begun to look like a mixed blessing at best.

Even before Bush, the Republican Congress was more interested in pork barrel, earmarks, and K Street favors than cutting government spending. After Bush, discretionary spending grew faster than it did under Bill Clinton. The biggest new entitlement program since LBJ’s Great Society was added to the federal budget. Another Cabinet-level department was created.

Level-headed Republicans would counter that the worst of this happened a decade or more ago. (Indeed, that is the timeline for No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, and worst of all the Iraq war.) Denny Hastert and Tom DeLay are gone. Why take it all out on John Boehner and Mitch McConnell?

But the Wall Street bailout wasn’t ten years ago. Neither was the decision to renege on the $100 billion in spending cuts Republicans promised in 2010. It was fairly obvious that many Republicans hoped the Tea Party would follow past waves of conservative activism: it would help the GOP win elections and without being overly concerned about the process of actually governing.

But the Tea Party activists were not satisfied. Instead they made an ever-growing list of demands that the Republicans—controlling just one house of Congress—were in no position to deliver on. In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich demonstrated the limits of trying to govern the country from the House. And he had a Republican Senate and a Democratic president willing to play ball on some conservative issues.

As the Republicans produced fewer meaningful conservative policy outcomes, they spoke in ever shriller tones about the stakes of each election. Large parts of the base believed them, but then did a surprising thing: they began to ask questions when Republicans didn’t govern accordingly.

So when even so conservative a Republican as Tom Coburn says the Obamacare defunding gambit is unlikely to work, conservatives see another sellout on the way. When Cruz wants to fight, no one has the credibility to argue that avoiding this battle is a matter of prudence, not surrender.

When Republicans had power, they did little for conservatives. Now conservatives expect much from Republicans, even when they have little power.

The good news is conservative activists are keeping Republicans from repeating the Bush-league mistakes of the past. The bad news is they are making a whole set of new ones.

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60 Responses to It Gets Worse for the GOP

@William Dalton: My understanding is that the TEA Party basically started in Seattle in early February 2009, with protests started by a local Seattle conservative activist upset about the stimulus bill.

A week or so later (as I recall) financial journalist Rick Santelli called for protests against the federal guarantees of mortgages. The media picked up on the “Tea Party” name and ran with it.

Elite Comminc, the Tea Party has to start calling out their paranoid racists, xenophobes and conspiracy theorists, and the the rest of the American people will start taking them seriously as a movement concerned about government spending.

Lets just be blunt- far from being to radical, the GOP has been completely spineless. It was unConstitutional to allow Obama in the White House in 2009 and its STILL unConstitutional today. The man whomever he really may be is for a certainty NOT a Natural Born Citizen. He occupies the Presidency by what a mounts to a coup. Yet not a single Republican in Congress or any of the hundreds to thousands of others who drew paychecks to ensure fair/law-abiding national elections dared to stand. What a collection of worthless cowards.

“The Tea Party protests were a series of protests across the United States that began in early 2009. The protests were part of the larger political Tea Party movement.

Among other events, protests were held on:

February 27, 2009, to protest the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) U.S. financial system bailouts signed by President George W. Bush in October, 2008, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulus legislation signed by President Barack Obama.
April 15, 2009, to coincide with the annual U.S. deadline for submitting tax returns, known as Tax Day.”

“When the Tea Party starts purging its 1) birthers and 2) proponents of civil war, I’ll start considering an apology.”

1. Can you explain Barack Obama’s past? Such as his radical mentors and shady promoters? Why is he trying to keep them secret? Or, perhaps you just don’t care?
2. Who, exactly, is proposing a civil war? Names and dates, please. Farrakhan, Sharpton, JJ, NAACP, CBC use overheated rhetoric- where are your calls for the Democrats to “purge” them? Dates and links, please.
Thanks.

To your point the the Republicans can’t seem to get serious about cutting the spending:

The only real spending to cut is Defense or Medicare or Social Security.

Defense can’t be cut, because the defense spending is essentially a Red State Entitlement Program; they can take that government money and not feel like they are being socialistic.

And unfortunately, the GOP voter base is older and very reliant on Medicare and Social Security. So they really can’t cut that either, it’s not popular and they know it. The GOP plan for cutting Social Security or Medicare is to try and make the Democrats do it.

The only thing they really want to do is cut taxes. And then pretend that they have no connection to the budget and/or deficit.

The whole Republican policy agenda is fundamentally not serious and does not add up. The problem right now is that GOP voters have been fed so much misinformation for so long that they have no idea how any of this might work. So you see the Tea Party protesters with the signs that say ‘keep government hands off my Medicare’.

I have always maintained that health care financing should have been left up to the various states to implement, with one suggestion that the state programs be designed in the same fashion as workers comp insurance with a “public option” i.e. a state insurance fund financed 50/50 by the insurance industry and the public. In any event we had a working model in the form of RomneyCare in Massachusetts (on which ObamaCare was partially based). The Limbaugh-Hannity crowd shot it down as “statist”. We have no clue how ObamaCare will work in the long run. If it does not work the way they intended it’s onward to a single payer system. And as to the latter, lots o’ luck!

Answers1: Obama was born August 4th, 1961 in Hawaii, USA. He is a liberal who as a young man fell in with left wing radicals. He’s embarrassd by his earlier connections and so doesn’t advertise them. The official Tea Party manifesto doesn’t promote civil war; many self-described Tea Partiers do openly at events and on other chatboards, along with a general attempt to completely delegitimize Obama, as if he took power via a coup.

Clint, buddy: You only prove that the Tea Party suddenly got interested in the size and scope of government finally in 2009, AFTER the disaster which was the GW Bush presidency and once Obama took office. Thank you for that.